Even perfect-fit midscale chain comfort food eatery Founding Farmers is dragging its feet on moving to the ground floor of yet another mauvescraper-to-be hotel at the Reston-Wiehle Metro station, saying it opted instead to focus first on opening a new location at -- of all places -- a giant shopping mall in suburban Philadelphia. A shopping mall! Oh, how far our transit-oriented champagne wishes and caviar dreams of mixed-use nirvana have fallen! Who knows if when this next partial parallelogram is built, they'll replace the fancy neon with a couple of bug zappers:

Meanwhile across town, what would be Reston's tallest building is still casting about for tenants, what with their original CGI renderings of awesome simulated DEALMAKING failing to win over a major contractor of the strapping-bomb-to-dolphins variety (at least so far). Which is surprising, given this sweeeeeet new rendering of the lobby giving it a high-tech Austin Powers sort of vibe:

This next photo looks a little Sim City-like, but it gives you a sense of what the RTC-adjacent skyline soon will look like.

Meanwhile, car dealership cloverleaf America's next great city Tysons Corner is preparing for its own, even more massive mauvescraper complex, including what would be the tallest building in the region and a snazzy name presumably inspired by mid-day television. We can only hope that its lofty heights will not block the sun's rays from hitting the giant statue of Crystal Koons to be built atop Tysons' fancy new underground intersection.

All in all, things are looking up! (Get it?) We can only hope that the longstanding predictions of the region's changing business environment, smaller office footprints and lower expectations as expressed in facile terms by the car of choice in area parking lots all are false and that at some point, we actually get tenants and residents to fill all these fancy high-rises, the end.

4 comments:

I'd like to know why it is okay for a highrise to have purple lights on the exterior, but I can't replace an existing part of my house with exactly the same thing without going through the DRB. It bothers me immensely that individual homeowners who pay a LOT of money for neighborhood association AND Reston Association have less leeway than a corporation. Reston wasn't supposed to be about who moved in with the most money.

Hate to admit it, but I actually kind of like the neon lights. And while the RA is ridiculous about many things, there's no doubt you can do things in business areas that you can't in residential ones -- like signs, as that nice Give Peace a Chance person just found out.

The Dulles Toll Road corridor is actually outside RA purview currently. There have been articles about trying to get developers to add the parcels to Reston Association (see BLVD) with various degrees of success (also see BLVD)